Marisa Fernandez, - Axios
Stephan: And as long as we are talking about mothers and children let's also state this truth: Public school healthcare in the United States sucks; it may be the worst in the developed world. I could only find 2015-2016 figures before Trump took office, and Betsy DeVos became Secretary of Education, but I can state this definitively: the 2019-2020 figures, if they are ever released, are going to be even worse.
An overwhelming majority of schools in the U.S. lack nurses and counselors to help students in need, per a 2019 ACLU report from Education Department data on every school district.
Why it matters: Children are reporting just as much stress as adults, with one in three reporting that they are feeling depressed.
- Students are 21 times more likely to visit school-based health centers for mental health than community mental health centers.
- Especially in low-income districts where resources are scarce, these mental health providers at schools can be a district’s first line of defense.
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Stephan: For me, one of the most notable things about the coronavirus pandemic is the buckets, carts, trucks, entire trains of disinformation and crap being put out on this topic. Part of the reason for this flourishing emetic spewing, I think, is the fact that for the first time in my memory when the country is faced with a medical emergency citizens cannot trust a word coming out of the White House or the president's mouth. It's not just the willfully ignorant and inaccurate things criminal Trump says. It is that he doesn't even seem to be intellectually capable of understanding what a virus is.
Readers have sent me all manner of stuff, the worse being a "psychic" telling everyone that Covid-19 is actually a biological terror weapon created by the CIA and the CDC to stop Trump's re-election. So here are some actual facts.
Workers inside the Wuhan Institute of Virology in Wuhan, China, in 2017. Conspiracy theorists have conjectured the lab is the origin of the Covid-19 coronavirus outbreak; scientific evidence shows it’s not.
Credit: AFP via Getty
The signs that the small, scattered coronavirus outbreak in the United States could spiral into a larger-scale problem are growing. A new analysis, first reported by STAT, found there are likely now 500 to 600 (mostly undetected) cases of Covid-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus, in Washington state alone. “January 1 in Wuhan was March 1 in Seattle,” computational biologist Trevor Bedford, who did the analysis, told STAT, referring to the Chinese city where the virus emerged and began rapidly infecting humans.
The decisions federal and local public health officials make this week — to test more people with symptoms, inform the public about the risk, isolate the sick, and institute other measures — will be crucial. So will the speed at which they execute them.
This could be a make-or-break moment where US cases remain relatively low and […]
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Thursday, March 5th, 2020
Stephan A. Schwartz, Editor - Schwartzreport
Stephan: One of my main take aways from the Coronavirus pandemic is what it has revealed about criminal Trump's dismantlement of American science and medicine, and the neutral bureaucracies that develop and administer science-based policies. The long term consequences of this trend are very dire. So I am devoting today's SR to articles that address what is happening.
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Thursday, March 5th, 2020
REBECCA LEBER, Reporter - Mother Jones
Stephan: Criminal Trump doesn't like science because it has an often restraining impact on his greed and grifting. Pence doesn't like science because it conflicts with his rabid literalist "christian" fundamentalism. Together they appoint lobbyists and hacks to positions that by definition require politically neutral scientific objective views. The result: whether it is increased pollution or medical preparedness the United States is increasingly unprepared to effectively deal with crises. The implications of this Trumpian devastation of American science are profound and will negatively affect your life, and the life or your family in myriad ways.
Sadly, that won't stop millions of Americans from voting for Trumplicans.
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Credit: fivethirtyeight[/caption]
Trump shuts down EPA use of science
Credit: Washington Times
As more states learned they have rising numbers of confirmed cases of coronavirus Tuesday evening—now 16 states report at least 135 cases—the EPA made an important announcement: The agency is moving closer to finalizing a policy for restricting what health studies it can consider for any of the EPA’s scientific work. That would mean the agency would be forced only to consider studies that can publish their raw data, which in effect means ignoring entire fields of epidemiology research that relies on private, anonymized medical data to study the impacts of pollution.
“In the midst of a public health crisis, Americans deserve a government that relies on the best available science to protect everyone against harm,” Obama EPA head and President of the Natural Resources Defense Council Gina McCarthy said in a statement. “This proposal does the opposite.”
When the original draft of “Strengthening Transparency in Regulatory Science” was published
two years ago, it alarmed the scientific community and attracted
600,000 comments, mostly from […]
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Thursday, March 5th, 2020
Hiroko Tabuchi, - The New York Times
Stephan: Here is yet another take on this corruption of American science by criminal Trump and his minions. In my view, this is a very big deal. If you don't live in a fact-based world, you cannot make policies that deal with the factual reality. In a host of ways, this results in deleterious social outcomes.
At the Interior Department, an official has pressured scientists to include misleading claims about climate change in their work.Credit…Victor J. Blue/The New York Times
An official at the Interior Department embarked on a campaign that has inserted misleading language about climate change — including debunked claims that increased carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is beneficial — into the agency’s scientific reports, according to documents reviewed by The New York Times.
The misleading language appears in at least nine reports, including environmental studies and impact statements on major watersheds in the American West that could be used to justify allocating increasingly scarce water to farmers at the expense of wildlife conservation and fisheries.
The effort was led by Indur M. Goklany, a longtime Interior Department employee who, in 2017 near the start of the Trump administration, was promoted to the office of the deputy secretary with responsibility for reviewing the agency’s climate policies. The Interior Department’s scientific work is the basis for critical decisions […]
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